My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now, using GLM-4.5 Air and MLX
I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday—new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such as Claude Sonnet 4.
The models are pretty big—the smaller GLM-4.5 Air model is still 106 billion total parameters, which is 205.78GB on Hugging Face.
Ivan Fioravanti built this 44GB 3bit quantized version for MLX, specifically sized so people with 64GB machines could have a chance of running it. I tried it out... and it works extremely well.
I fed it the following prompt:
Write an HTML and JavaScript page implementing space invaders
And it churned away for a while and produced the following:
Clearly this isn’t a particularly novel example, but I still think it’s noteworthy that a model running on my 2.5 year old laptop (a 64GB MacBook Pro M2) is able to produce code like this—especially code that worked first time with no further edits needed.
How I ran the model
I had to run it using the current main branch of the mlx-lm library (to ensure I had this commit adding glm4_moe support). I ran that using uv like this:
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